Alec Nevala-Lee

As regular readers of this blog know, I love commentary tracks, both for their insights into the filmmaking process and for what they reveal, often unintentionally, about the people doing the talking. Nowhere is this more the case than in Dan Harmon’s commentary for the Community episode “Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking,” a terrific episode from one of the best seasons of television ever produced. In a departure from the show’s usual style, the episode is shot in the mockumentary format that has been been all but obligatory for smart, ambitious sitcoms ever since the premiere of The Office, and while the episode itself offers plenty to talk about, Harmon spends most of the commentary delivering a humorous, somewhat self-deprecating, but ultimately totally earnest attack on the use of these documentary conventions by shows like Parks & Recreation and Modern Family, which, he implies, is the comedic equivalent of playing tennis without a net.

Harmon argues, and not without reason, that the mockumentary format basically allows comedy writers to take the easy way out: it’s much easier to make a fast-paced sitcom when you can just cut away to a character explaining what he’s thinking, underline jokes using montage, voiceover, and flashbacks, or zoom in on a facial expression or an important detail. Community, he continues, is trying to do something much harder, which is to deliver similarly dense, scripted comedy without the mockumentary crutch. He also complains, quite sincerely, that viewers and critics don’t sufficiently appreciate this. Quite the opposite, in fact: the documentary format is faster, cheaper, and wins more awards, so it’s no wonder that sitcom creators prefer it over more conventional single-camera comedy. And a subsequent interview with The A.V. Club makes it clear that Harmon means what he says:

I just wanted to [work in the documentary format] to see what it was like. You know, to take those weights off our ankles. I feel like 30 Rock and Community never get an award for doing a format that’s twice as hard. Because it really is twice as hard…Now we have to go back to playing the violin while [other shows] play stickball.

I’ve been thinking about this commentary track a lot, and not just for the obvious reasons, ever since the news broke that Harmon had been fired as the showrunner of Community. Harmon is clearly a genius, but nearly everything I’ve ever heard him say indicates that he’s an incredibly neurotic guy, competitive, perfectionistic, and insecure even in the midst of success. According to industry gossip, he wasn’t easy to work with, and his management issues may have been partially responsible for the departures of creative talent that the show had suffered in recent seasons. From the point of view of Sony, which made the decision to replace him, it probably seemed like a no-brainer: a sitcom is supposed to be an efficient machine for producing content, which doesn’t exactly describe Community, for reasons that any interview—or commentary track—with Dan Harmon will make abundantly clear.

And yet here’s the thing: Harmon isn’t wrong. What he did with Community was incredibly hard, in ways that aren’t always obvious. It’s easy to point to big conceptual stories like “Remedial Chaos Theory” or the recent “Digital Estate Planning” as evidence of Harmon’s talent, but as he points out, even the show’s more modest episodes are ambitious, complex mini-movies that consistently take big risks. They don’t always pay off, and the third season was noticeably uneven, but to even try to make this kind of television in the face of so much opposition requires the kind of combative, uncompromising personality that ultimately got Harmon fired. As he wrote on his blog: “I’m not saying you can’t make a good version of Community without me, but I am definitely saying that you can’t make my version of it unless I have the option of saying ‘has to be like this or I quit’ roughly eight times a day.” And while it’s too soon to tell whether Community without Harmon will be better or worse, it definitely won’t be the same.

I can’t quite remember when I gave up on Glee. For the first two seasons, I watched the show regularly, both because I enjoyed it and because it was the kind of creative, ambitious mess that can be more interesting to think about than a conventionally tidy series. Glee often fell flat on its face, but it did so in unexpected ways that made me reflect on the nature of storytelling, the challenges of episodic television, and the power of ensembles. After a while, though, it just became too exhausting. The show was still good for a handful of transcendent moments, but I found it increasingly hard to sit through the rest, especially as it became clear that the writers had no idea what to do with their most important characters. Finally, I just stopped. Until this week, I hadn’t watched an episode all year, not since “Asian F,” which aired all the way back in October.

And yet I occasionally found myself missing it. Sometimes I’d watch a clip online, or think back to the promise of Glee‘s first season, or just remember the characters, some of whom I still cared about, at least in their earlier incarnations. (I also had a surprisingly good time watching the concert movie on a plane.) Still, I wasn’t really tempted to check in again. As I recently put it to a friend of mine, there’s so much good television available these days, both on the air and on DVD, that I have no excuse for watching a show that doesn’t stand at the very top of its game. Mad Men, for instance, is basically awesome all the time, and Community isn’t far behind. And when I still haven’t seen most of the Sorkin years of The West Wing or all but a few episodes of The Sopranos, it’s hard to justify investing time in a show that pays off only intermittently.

Of course, if I’d followed this rule my entire life, I never would have watched The X-Files, my favorite show of all time, which seemed perversely intent on punishing viewers who expected anything like consistency. And sometimes it can be thrilling to see a show you love suddenly return to form. Todd VanDerWerff of the A.V. Club has always been one of Glee’s most interesting critics—he’s the one responsible for the theory of the three Glees—and he has an interesting take on this. To his mind, Glee could have been an observant, sad, but ultimately triumphant series about growing up in a small town while dealing with the failure of your own dreams, which is what it felt like in the pilot. Instead, it was taken over by ridiculous high concepts, big production numbers, and theme episodes, but would occasionally still send dispatches from an alternate universe where that other show still existed.

All of which is to say that I watched the show again this week, if only to see the kids win Nationals at last, and I enjoyed it. Still, it’s startling to realize how little I regret missing the past fifteen episodes: there were plot points or characters I didn’t recognize, but for the most part, this is the same show I remembered—and perhaps more fondly than if I’d been around for some of the low points in between. And as much as I liked this episode, I can also safely say that after this season, I’m done with Glee. Every television show ultimately boils down to a handful of moments in the viewer’s memory, an idealized version constructed out of its best pieces, and the Glee of my imagination—the one that was wistful, funny, and occasionally spectacular—is now complete. It was good to tune in one last time, but now that I’ve shared in that moment, it’s finally time to graduate.

I am truly at my happiest not when I am writing an aria for an actor or making a grand political or social point. I am at my happiest when I’ve figured out a fun way for somebody to slip on a banana peel.

—Aaron Sorkin, to Vanity Fair

Earlier this week, my wife and I were lucky enough to attend a special screening of two episodes of HBO’s Veep, the new political comedy from the British writer and producer Armando Iannucci. I was excited to see it because I’m a big fan of Iannucci’s In The Loop, one of the best comedies of recent years, and because I love many of the actors in the cast, especially Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Vice President Selina Meyer and Tony Hale (who played Buster on Arrested Development) as her bodyguard and personal assistant. And Veep is, in fact, a very good, if not quite a great show: the pilot is mostly outstanding, and although the second episode I saw—which I believe is the third to be aired—isn’t quite at the same level, there’s still a lot of promise here. (I’ll give a shot to any series that refers to one of its characters, a White House liaison played by Timothy Simons, with the line, “Are we really going to let the guy with the police-sketch face of a rapist tell us what to do?”)

Of course, handicapping a television show based on its first two episodes is a fool’s game. We just don’t know where a series like this will go, and as with most shows, Veep needs to be judged less on its own merits than on the potential of the team it has assembled, and in this case, it’s a great one. I’ll happily watch Tony Hale in anything, and as for Julia Louis-Dreyfus, well, she’s spectacularly smart and attractive and funny, to an extent that may even undermine what the show tries to do with her character’s desperation. Still, she knows how to sell a joke. The scene where Selina Meyer leaves a meeting to briefly freak out over a mistake by her chief of staff—who has signed her own name instead of the Vice President’s on the condolence card for a deceased senator’s widow—is my favorite moment in the pilot. There’s no political subtext here, just pure comedy, and if the show can continue to deliver such payoffs, it’s going to be worth watching.

All the same, the show isn’t perfect. It leans heavily on farce, returns a few too many times to the same comedic wells—characters pretending to have deep conversations while other people are watching, for instance, or saying something offensive without realizing that someone is standing behind them—and occasionally slips into the stray Britishism. Its conception of political horse-trading is probably no less contrived than that of The West Wing, but it feels more like a television writer’s idea of how American politics works—it’s vaguely implausible without being redeemingly absurd. But the show’s strengths are evident as well, especially the luxuriantly profane dialogue, which is such a central part of Iannucci’s work that he outsources much of it, according to the New Yorker, to a profanity consultant (Ian Martin, who is also a writer on Veep).

It’s especially fun to watch Veep now that I’ve finally begun to work my way, in parallel, through the entire run of The West Wing. For whatever reason, I never watched the show when it first aired, but I can’t put it off any longer, especially with the recent resurgence of Aaron Sorkin as perhaps our most talented screenwriter—a gift that he evidently honed through years of writing a great television show. Veep is clearly positioned as a kind of rebuttal to The West Wing—Simons’s character is constantly mentioning that he works “in the West Wing of the White House,” prompting another character to ask, “Is there another West Wing?” And while The West Wing famously inspired many young people to enter politics, as noted in a recent Vanity Fair article, Veep may inspire members of the next generation to stay the hell away. As if they needed any other reason these days.

It’s hard to believe it, but Mad Men has been off the air for the entire time I’ve been writing this blog. (The finale of its fourth season aired on October 17, 2010, or just over a month before my introductory post.) In the year and a half since, I’ve discovered a lot of good and bad television: I fell out of love with Glee, dove headfirst into Community, Downton Abbey, and Breaking Bad, and apparently even watched a few episodes of Smash. But in all that time, I haven’t really had a chance to talk about the show that, more than any other televised drama of the past few years, has changed the way I think about storytelling in any medium. And while I don’t expect to start posting episode recaps anytime soon—that way lies madness, as Rich Juzwiak of Gawker recently pointed out—the show’s return gives me a chance to reflect on what is already starting to look like the best chance we’ve had in a long time to watch a great extended narrative reach its conclusion. And even if the show doesn’t manage to sustain the level of excellence it has maintained for so long (although Sunday’s premiere was a very encouraging sign), it’s still going to be fascinating.

Mad Men has been discussed endlessly, of course, but I’d like to focus on two related narrative aspects of the show, one immediately visible, the other only apparent over time. Let’s start with the latter. I’ve spoken before about the single greatest difficulty in making good television: the fact that a show’s creator doesn’t know whether he’ll have a single episode, or one season, or five years to tell a story. (Hence the predicament of a show like Twin Peaks, which burns off all of its best ideas in its first ten episodes and is left scrambling for more.) Mad Men, to an extent that I think is unique in recent television drama, has managed to remain shapely and satisfying no matter how you slice it. Its pilot is a perfect short movie with an unforgettable final shot, and if the show had simply ended there, with Vic Damone’s swelling rendition of “The Street Where You Live,” many of us would have been left with fifty minutes that we’d never forget. Yet the first season, ending with “The Wheel,” found a perfect shape as well, as has every subsequent year, as the show moves effortlessly through a series of ascending narrative climaxes. (Just the titles of each season finale are enough to give me the chills: “Meditations In an Emergency”; “Shut the Door. Have a Seat”; “Tomorrowland.”)

The result, to put things in as nerdy a way as possible, is what I can only describe as a sort of narrative scale invariance—that property, common to fractals and other self-similar objects, in which each part is similar to that of the whole. And this applies to individual episodes as well. Mad Men benefits from a glorious fineness of detail, in which the smallest touches resonate with the largest overall themes, so that a single shot or moment can encapsulate an entire season. The first thing that catches anyone’s eye about Mad Men is the show’s design: it’s one of the most visually seductive series I’ve ever seen. And while this certainly hasn’t hurt its popular appeal, it isn’t a superficial factor, but an essential part of the show’s composed storytelling, in which art direction, costume design, and music are inseparable parts of the narrative. When Betty Draper descends the stairs in “For Those Who Think Young” to the strains of “Song of India,” it’s an image that ties up everything the show has been about up to that point, only to be ironically echoed when the same song recurs ten episodes later in “The Jet Set.” To dismiss these pleasures as incidental is to miss the point entirely: this is a show in which the glossiest effects can turn around to blindside you with emotion.

All of these qualities were on display in last night’s season premiere. Above all else, the show continues to be a model of swift, facile storytelling, with small gags and throwaways nicely interspersed with the big dramatic moments. (I especially liked Lane Pryce’s little dance, and Pete’s wistful line: “Maybe just a beagle to scare off gophers.”) Jessica Paré’s instantly iconic scene reminds us that the show, like most great works of art, has no qualms about giving the audience what it wants, even as it surprises us with the consequences. That fine, fractal quality of detail remains, as the show closes in on unexpected images—a shaving brush, a lost wallet, a baby’s behind—and uses them to hint at larger themes. And it continues to benefit from its great cast, which taught me a lot about the power of ensembles, and which grows in richness with every season. At this point, the show’s ambition is matched only by its control: the premiere is spaced at a capacious ninety minutes, taking us through everything from racial politics to racy burlesque, yet there isn’t a wasted moment, and it’s all one piece. Where Matthew Weiner and his collaborators will take the show from here is anyone’s guess, but I know I’ll be watching closely. And taking notes.

The more I think about it, the more I suspect that making great television over the course of multiple seasons might be the most challenging of all sustained creative acts. On a practical level, it’s arguably harder than directing a movie or writing a novel, not just because of the scale and speed required, but because of the uncertainty inherent in network scheduling, in which a show’s creator doesn’t know whether he’ll have one episode, half a season, or six seasons and a movie. Few series have suffered from more uncertainty than Dan Harmon’s Community, which, despite a vocal fan following, has always seemed on the verge of cancellation. Its return is therefore all the more cause for celebration, not simply because the show survived, but because it thrived under awful circumstances: no other contemporary series, not even Mad Men, has faced the vagaries of modern television as well as Community, which has pushed the boundaries of the sitcom in every episode while somehow adding up to a satisfying whole. The result is a master class in both comedy and storytelling.

When I think of Community, the first word that comes to mind is balance. This may seem surprising, given some of the truly unhinged episodes that the show has produced over the past few years, but what really stands out with this series is its ability to coordinate a wide range of impulses and ambitions—any one of which, left unchecked, would lead to disaster—within one remarkably cohesive vision. It’s a fantastically structured and plotted show that also leaves room for its characters to evolve through improvisation. It’s breathtakingly smart and honestly emotional. It’s a whirlwind history of recent pop culture (the second season is the first thing I’d throw into a time capsule to give future generations a sense of what this decade was like) and also fundamentally grounded in the lives of its seven major characters. And like Glee, it began with a cast meant to evoke sitcom stereotypes and then gradually reveal greater depths, but unlike Glee, it succeeded.

The comparison with Glee, which I’m not the first to make—Todd VanDerWerff of the A.V. Club has set it out admirably—is perhaps the most instructive. From its first episodes on, Glee was manifestly a show of vast ambition but limited ability to realize its goals. Community, by contrast, has aimed even higher and nailed every challenge it set for itself. And its ambitions have only grown over time. This was a smart, funny show right out of the gate, but it wasn’t until late in the first season that it locked on to its true potential. Part of this was its discovery of the range of things it could do, from tightly written bottle episodes to fake clip shows to epic parodies of action and science fiction movies, but it also involved refining the characters to take advantage of the strengths of its cast, particularly the astonishing triumvirate of Donald Glover, Danny Pudi, and Gillian Jacobs. (Jacobs, in particular, has been a revelation in the second half of the show’s run, as Britta evolved from a bland voice of reason to a glorious train wreck of a human being.)

Above all else, Community reminds us how to be clever. I’ve written at length about the perils of cleverness, and there are certainly critics who see the show as nothing more than a cleverness machine, churning out movie references and pastiches for its tiny audience. Yet the show’s real cleverness doesn’t lie in its inside jokes and nerd-culture homages—otherwise, it would be little more than a more cuddly version of Family Guy—but in its ability to integrate them into a world that feels emotional and real. Greendale is one of those fictional places in which we want to believe, populated by characters who feel like our friends, and whose lives and problems remain consistent even as they’re fighting zombies or split into alternate timelines. That’s more than clever; it’s astounding. My favorite episode consists of nothing but the characters talking around a table for twenty minutes, but it works because they’re doing exactly what the show does every week: telling stories. And it does it as well as any show I’ve ever seen.

Over the past few weeks, my wife and I finally caught up on DVD with the first season of Community, a show that absolutely lives up to its reputation—it’s the fastest, smartest, funniest television comedy I’ve seen since Arrested Development. There’s a lot to talk about here, and I hope to dig in more deeply as soon as we’ve finished the rest of the series, but today, I’d like to focus on just one element: the genius decision to confine the action, at least in the first season, to the campus of Greendale Community College. The vast majority of scenes take place in one of a handful of sets—the study room, the cafeteria, Señor Chang’s classroom—and far from limiting the stories the show can tell, it makes the world in which it takes place seem all the more real. After only a handful of episodes, Greendale becomes one of those places on television that you believe in, and want to visit yourself, like the bar on Cheers, the offices of Sterling Draper, or even Downton Abbey.

It’s a brilliant illustration of a powerful tool that I’ve wanted to talk about for a long time, which is the idea of a narrative home base. I can’t find the reference now, but I believe it was Terry Rossio who talks about how, in a screenplay, it’s nice to have a single set or location to which you return repeatedly over the course of the story: for one reason for another, the audience likes to find itself in a familiar place. This is obviously true in television, which often depends on a handful of standing sets, but it’s also true of works of art that aren’t necessarily limited by such constraints. Looking at my own favorite movies, it’s startling to realize how many are built around the repeated use of the same location, with dramatic variations: Rick’s Café Américain, Hannibal Lecter’s cell, the apartments in Chungking Express and Blue Velvet. Returning to the same place gives the action a fixed backdrop to play against over time, allowing the audience to get its bearings and ground itself in the story.

The same thing applies to literary works. The most famous address in all of literature is, of course, 221B Baker Street, but it’s instructive to stop and ask ourselves why. With a few exceptions, notably “The Adventure of the Empty House,” it’s rarely the setting for any dramatic incidents; it’s simply where Holmes and Watson hang out. Yet it’s impossible to imagine the stories without that drawing room, with its cigars in the coal scuttle and Persian slipper full of tobacco, and fans have imagined its location and furnishings with astonishing degrees of obsessiveness. Eventually, it comes to feel like home. And it took me far too long to understand how useful a home base can be for immersing the reader in the plot. The Icon Thief jumps from place to place, and I think it works, but I prefer the approach in City of Exiles, with its repeated use of several key locations. And it’s no accident that I learned this from Mad Men.

This may, in fact, be one of the two great lessons—along with the power of ensembles—that television has to teach us. Setting most of your action in a fixed number of places is a constraint, yes, but it also allows you to focus on what really matters, a form of writerly discipline that will hopefully pay off in the narrative itself. Imagine how much more interesting Smash would be, for instance, if it took place, like Community, entirely in a few locations—the theater, the dance studio, the writers’ office—with details about the characters’ offstage lives sketched in on the fly. That way, we’d pick up information in passing, instead of cutting away to tiresome subplots, and the focus of the series would stay where it belongs. Because focus is what the narrative home base is all about: storytelling is really about creating places to explore, so it’s all the more important, when possible, to stick to the places that count.

It’s safe to say that of the millions of viewers who tuned in last night for the premiere of NBC’s Smash, few were hoping to see a show about a couple of writers. The deluge of ads that aired during the Super Bowl promise an old-fashioned backstage melodrama, and on that count, the series delivers. (Perhaps a little too well—even given the disorderly nature of most network pilots, it has at least one personal subplot too many.) But I decided to check out the show for somewhat different reasons, which means that I’m going to ignore most of its other attractions, including the very fetching Katharine McPhee, to talk about a version of Smash that doesn’t exist yet, and probably never will. Because as farfetched as it might seem, this show represents the best chance we’ve had in a long time for a series about what I modestly think is the most interesting subject in the world, which is the creative process at work.

For obvious reasons, most movies or TV shows about writers aren’t very good. This is partially because a writer’s life doesn’t lend itself to visual storytelling, unless you’re going to indulge in frequent fantasy sequences—as Smash is clearly quite willing to do. It’s solitary work, without a lot of dramatic moments, and it doesn’t lend itself to neat character arcs. The movies like to pretend that there’s an intimate relationship between an artist’s life and work, but in fact, there’s often no correlation between the two. Writers can produce their best work on lousy personal days, and vice versa; most attempts to write biographies of Shakespeare (or, even less forgivably, the Earl of Oxford) based on clues from the plays founder on the fact that he didn’t necessarily write tragedies when he was miserable, or comedies when he was happy. A writer’s life, perhaps ironically, is doomed to frustrate most of our expectations about good storytelling.

When you have two writers in the room, however, that’s something else entirely. It’s no accident that the best works of art about the creative process often center on a collaborative relationship, which generally means some form of theater. I’m thinking of The Red Shoes, of course, which is my favorite movie of all time, but also of works as different as Topsy-Turvy and The Dick Van Dyke Show, the latter of which made writing for television seem like the coolest job around. And while it’s far too early to include Smash in that select company, there are some positive signs. We have a very appealing pair of writers in Debra Messing and Christian Borle, who, to my eyes, are the real stars of this show. If nothing else, Messing and Borle have real chemistry—which is more than I can say for McPhee and her ambiguously gay boyfriend—and in their scenes together in the pilot, I saw a glimpse of a show that I could learn to love.

Of course, this isn’t necessarily the show that creator Theresa Rebeck has in mind—although her recent interview with the A.V. Club was very promising. And we’re probably going to see many more fantasy musical numbers and karaoke scenes before we plunge any deeper into a writer’s inner life. But the producers of any television show are writers, first and foremost, and there are moments in the Smash pilot that feel like closely observed moments of what it means to write for Broadway. Messing is initially skeptical of the idea of a musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe, for instance, until she realizes that it will give her a chance to write a baseball number—and I suspect that all writers have been drawn to projects for equally random reasons. This leads to the truest moment in the pilot, when Messing confesses her real reason for wanting to write Marilyn: “I don’t want anyone else to do her.”  That’s a sentiment that any writer can recognize. And if Smash can follow up on these hints, it could become something really special.

On Sunday, I did something that I rarely ever do: I watched the pilots of two new TV shows. Part of this was thanks to the realization that with a new series, I can watch just one episode and get a blog post out of it. (By contrast, I still have the entire fourth season to finish before I feel qualified to write anything about Breaking Bad.) I was also intrigued by these two particular shows, but for very different reasons. One is Touch, from Heroes creator Tim Kring, a writer best known for blowing up his own fanbase while running his previous show into the ground. The other is Luck, from David Milch and Michael Mann, two erratic geniuses whose best impulses are hard to distinguish from their worst, but whose involvement in any project is inherently exciting. And while I predictably liked one show far more than the other, both have interesting things to say about the pitfalls of trying to create good, reasonably intelligent television for a large popular audience.

Believe it or not, I was looking forward to Touch, and not just for the chance to hear Kiefer Sutherland say “Dammit!” again. While most of the reviews were negative or skeptical, they grudgingly granted that the show displayed a certain structural ingenuity, or, to quote Ryan McGee of the AV Club: “This is extremely well-made schlock.” Unfortunately, Touch turns out to be the kind of show that wants us to be intrigued by the Fibonacci sequence without ever explaining why. It supplies one of those narratives, familiar from movies like Babel, that present elaborate webs of coincidence as a reflection of how the world really works. The trouble with both Touch and Babel is that by the end, we aren’t looking at any version of reality, but at a system of contrivance developed by the screenplay. The show revolves around an autistic boy who can allegedly see the uncanny patterns underlying all of reality, but ultimately, he’s just privy to Kring’s script notes. The result is a slickly made show that is content to seem smart on the most superficial level possible.

To its credit, Luck takes the opposite approach: this is a genuinely intelligent show that doesn’t seem to care much about holding the audience’s hand. This doesn’t mean that it’s impenetrable. Some of the early buzz about the show’s alleged incomprehensibility made it sound like Mann and Milch were adapting Finnegans Wake, but this is simply a show that rewards close attention, and perhaps multiple viewings. (I ended up watching the first twenty minutes twice, and I’m glad I did.) Like many previous outings from Mann and Milch, it’s steeped in the arcana of a complex, mostly masculine world, in this case that of horse racing, and one of the show’s pleasures is its confidence that the viewer will pick up most of this material on the fly. It’s true that much of it seems obscure at first, but it isn’t because, as with Touch, that there’s no greater depth to be found: there’s just a lot going on here, and if we occasionally need to consult a cheat sheet, it’s a small price to pay.

As it happens, the two pilots have a plot point in common—a winning lottery ticket, or its equivalent—and it’s instructive to consider the radically different approaches they take. Touch has a lottery ticket that’s basically a callback to Lost: a string of mystical numbers that win on a particular day simply because the script requires it. Luck, by contrast, takes us through the details of a $2.6 million pick six ticket to the point where we can understand the strategy behind each choice, until the outcome, while in some ways equally contrived, feels inevitable. That’s the difference between these two shows: drill down at any point with Luck, and you uncover a whole world of texture, information, and experience, while any attempt to dig deeper with Touch just gives you Tim Kring and his laptop. And the funny thing is that both shows essentially succeed at what they’re trying to do—which should remind us that in television, as in life, you only win as much as you’re willing to risk.

Note: Mild spoilers follow for the first season of Downton Abbey.

Time, in television, can be a tricky thing. Because most series are still viewed over the course of several years, the way in which narrative time maps onto the show’s actual duration can present some unexpectedly thorny problems. In general, sitcoms and police procedurals do their best to ignore the passage of time altogether, while teenage soaps and other shows faced with the problem of aging casts tend to cover one year per season, which at least makes intuitive sense. Things get stickier with serialized dramas like Lost or Breaking Bad, in which events that viewers experience over multiple seasons really only cover a few highly eventful weeks or months. And although most shows, whatever their approach to chronology, tend to keep the flow of time more or less consistent, there are also cases like the third season of 24 or the fifth season of Desperate Housewives, in which the internal timeline is abruptly advanced by several years.

I’ve been mulling over these issues while watching the first season of Downton Abbey, which my wife and I just finished. When we first began, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I quickly realized why this series has acquired such a passionate following: for the most part, this is a really compelling show, even for those of us who haven’t seen much drama in the Upstairs, Downstairs mold. Among its many other virtues, it rapidly introduces a huge ensemble cast, so that by the end of the third episode we know at least a little about twenty men and women, which is no small feat. Its Yorkshire country house setting is flexible enough to encompass a wide range of stories, from melodrama to romance to farce. And while there’s rarely much in the way of action, it’s edited with the pace of a thriller, with the show cutting swiftly between parallel storylines that hit their dramatic beats and move on. The result is a show that really sucks you in, and the first five episodes are close to perfect.

Once again, however, we’re presented with the problem of time, which Downton Abbey never really solves to its own satisfaction. The show opens with news of the sinking of the Titanic and ends with the declaration of war against Germany, meaning that the internal chronology of its seven episodes extends over more than two years. Yet the events of the show seem to cover much less time, both subjectively and dramatically: the relationships don’t advance between episodes, and certain subplots, like the question of who has been pilfering bottles from the wine cellar, are stretched out beyond all belief, once you realize how much calendar time has allegedly passed. This becomes a real problem in the sixth episode, in which the chryon “May 1914″ is prominently displayed and a character self-consciously mentions that he’s been at Downton for two years, when it still seems as if he’s just arrived. It’s a jarring effect that throws the entire series off balance, at least to this viewer, until what had seemed almost effortlessly involving suddenly feels artificial and strained.

I can understand why Julian Fellowes, the show’s creator, wanted the first season to be framed by the Titanic and the war, but the fabric of the narrative can’t quite sustain it. (It would have been better, perhaps, if he’d chosen to open the show with something besides the Titanic: Downton’s heirs could have been dispatched in some other way, eight months or so before the war began, and the show wouldn’t have had to sweat so much to make it to August 1914.) By the end of the first season, the wheels are coming off: the second half of the finale, with a dozen plot threads crammed into the last act, is especially weak, with characters we care about left with only a few minutes to finish up their business before the war is declared. Downton Abbey deserves to unfold at its own pace, but can’t avoid being forced into an inconvenient timeline. And while this may serve as a commentary on history, it more likely reflects the slippery nature of television itself.

Last year, I wrote a long post titled “The sad case of Hannibal Lecter,” in which I lamented the fact that one of the most compelling fictional characters of the past thirty years had been destroyed by excessive backstory and authorial indulgence. Since then, this posting has become one of the most frequently viewed entries on this blog—mostly because of people searching for the Hannibal Lecter mask—and I’ve had a chance to revisit Lecter several more times, notably while reflecting on the movie adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs. What remains unchanged is my original conviction that Lecter is a ferociously effective supporting player who wilts when thrust into the spotlight, a wish-fulfillment character who doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It’s always dangerous when an author falls in love with his own creation, and in this case, fond father Thomas Harris ended up being Lecter’s worst enemy.

So you can imagine my feelings at the announcement that Lecter is being retooled for a new television series, of all things, focusing on the relationship between Hannibal and FBI profiler Will Graham prior to the events of Red Dragon. Bryan Fuller, the producer given the unenviable task of bringing this show to life, is a smart guy, and it’s possible that he’ll surprise me with an unexpected take on the material. And Lecter will evidently be confined to his cell for most of the series, which is exactly where he belongs. But for the most part, this project seems utterly misguided, an attempt to wring the last bit of interest out of a character who made his most indelible impression in eighteen minutes of screen time. Even if there really is demand for more Lecter, this is a textbook example of Joss Whedon’s axiom: “Don’t give people what they want. Give them what they need.”

And yet there’s a bright side to all this. Thomas Harris, despite his self-imposed seclusion, was once the best suspense novelist in the world. There’s a reason why The Silence of the Lambs recently topped NPR’s list of the best thrillers of all time: no one, not even Forsyth, has been better than Harris at his peak. And one of the saddest spectacles in recent literature has been watching Harris waste his talent on Lecter. After the novel Hannibal, there was clearly nowhere else for the character to go—especially once the movie version’s ending departed so radically from the original—so Harris was forced to dig deep into backstory, with the usual sorry results. Lecter’s dialogue used to be razor sharp, if often slightly too clever; in Hannibal Rising, he was reduced to lines like “My heart hops at the sight of you, who taught my heart to sing.” As Anthony Lane said in his review of the book: “What the hell is going on here?”

But I remain hopeful that the old Harris still exists. We know for a fact that Harris is a slow, laborious writer: Stephen King has spoken of him as “writhing on the floor in agonies of frustration.” But the results were worth it. The more mediocre thrillers I read, the more I come to appreciate the Harris of Black Sunday, Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and even parts of Hannibal: his attention to detail, the density and texture of his prose, the inventiveness of his violence, and his odd compassion. And I’m convinced he can do it again, as long as he leaves Lecter behind. I’ve always thought that a new thriller by Harris, without Lecter, would be a major publishing event, and the fact that Harris seems willing to relinquish his most cherished creation to television—when he wrote Hannibal Rising expressly to prevent an unauthorized prequel from being made—implies that he has finally learned to let go. With Lecter outsourced to Bryan Fuller, could Harris give us another great novel? My heart hops at the thought.

Earlier this week, I was browsing at Borders in Oak Park, which has slashed its prices dramatically in preparation for going out of business, when I found myself leafing through the first volume of the new complete edition of The Family Circus. Over the past decade, of course, a number of publishers, notably Fangraphics, have produced fine collections of many landmark strips, starting with the flagship reprints of Peanuts. At first glance, Family Circus might seem like an odd candidate for canonization: nearly everyone, going back to that famous speech in Go, seems to agree that the strip is terrible. Yet as I started browsing through the first installment, which dates back to 1960, something strange started to happen: I laughed. Bil Keane wasn’t a genius like Charles Schulz, but he was a skilled artist and gag man, and those early strips are genuinely funny. (It isn’t hard to see how Bil’s son Glen grew up to become one of the most accomplished of the recent Disney animators.)

Reading these strips reminded me strongly of my own childhood, when the house was filled with my dad’s yellowing paperback editions of comic strips from the fifties and sixties. Most of these collections (nearly all of which are out of print, but which you can pick up for a dollar or so at any used bookstore) were of comics that had never been much good in my lifetime: B.C., The Wizard of Id, Andy Capp, Dennis the Menace. Yet almost invariably, when I went back to the classic period of a given strip, I found that it was funny, energetic, and lovingly rendered. By the time I was old enough to read them in the paper, these strips had been around for twenty years or more, the artists had grown more conservative, and the comics were tired shadows of their former selves. But when you look back at their early days, when their creators were still young, hungry, and excited by the medium, you can see why these strips endured for decades.

Of course, certain strips are so beloved that they can survive a dramatic fall in quality with most of their goodwill intact. Peanuts, in particular, has a reputation, deservedly, as the greatest comic strip of all time, but it’s hard to deny that its last fifteen years were a pale reflection of its past glory. And while the original strips have always been available in collected form, it’s still sad to think that there’s a generation of readers who only know Peanuts from its final days in the daily paper, and can reasonably be expected to wonder what all the fuss is about. Similarly, while nothing can take away from the brilliance of the first ten seasons or so of The Simpsons, its recent retreat affects more than the show’s legacy: as Dead Homer Society has pointed out more than once, the new episodes threaten to drive out the old in syndication, to the point where younger fans may never see some of the show’s greatest moments.

Needless to say, this is a tragedy—but isn’t it also a tragedy, albeit on a smaller scale, that the solid early years of Family Circus remain mostly undiscovered? Any work of art that runs over a long period of time, whether it’s a comic strip or television show, deserves to be judged by its glory days, but that doesn’t always happen. And as the recent roundup of classic newspaper comics at the A.V. Club reminds us, while it’s easy to feel sad that Gary Larson and Bill Watterson chose to end their strips in their prime, from an artistic point of view, it makes perfect sense. Few artists, even the greatest, have shown any inclination to quit while they were ahead, even though nearly every career shows some falling off at the end. The most we can do, then, is keep the memory of their best work alive, and hope that others will do the same for us. After all, who wants to be remembered primarily as a shadow of one’s former greatness? Not me.

Yesterday, after watching clips of Lady Gaga’s peculiar drag performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, I became aware of two things almost simultaneously. The first is that Gaga is the ultimate realization of what Cindy Sherman once promised. I’ve been a huge fan of Sherman’s ever since discovering her Untitled Film Stills, with their uneasy but seductive commentaries on roleplaying, voyeurism, and, above all, the importance of movies in shaping our ideas of ourselves and others. Although her work has grown increasingly alienating over time, she remains one of our most interesting artists, and you can draw a direct line from her to Gaga, an acknowledged fan. Indeed, Gaga might be Sherman’s daughter: both women are provocateurs, aggressively intelligent yet fascinatingly blank, famous but unknown, so that either could probably walk down the street unrecognized, after all the costumes and disguises have been stripped away.

Of course, Gaga is far more famous than Sherman has ever been, which leads me to my second realization, which is that we’re witnessing a cultural phenomenon that hasn’t been seen in twenty years or more. Gaga is that rarest of pop icons, a deservedly popular artist who also serves as a conduit for smuggling unexpected images and ideas into America’s heartland. The VMAs were seen by the largest audience in MTV history, which means that Gaga’s strange little drag act succeeded, if nothing else, in confusing the hell out of millions. I’m not saying that her performance as Jo Calderone was entirely successful—the reaction of most viewers was probably close to Justin Bieber’s—but the fact that it was staged at all, with such oddness and commitment, counts as a weird sort of triumph, a Whitney Biennial moment in a Jersey Shore world.

And a crucial part of Gaga’s genius is her accessibility. Some have criticized her for linking outrageous imagery to resolutely conventional (if highly accomplished) pop music, but it’s hard to imagine her ascending to her current cultural position in any other way. And her talent as a musician shouldn’t be underestimated. As a lifelong fan of the Pet Shop Boys, I’ve always believed that dance music can be as rich a form of expression as any other, and Gaga comes closer than any arena-level artist in a long time to achieving that magical combination of irony, earnestness, and encyclopedic skill. A song like “Alejandro” is a miniature history of pop music, both good and bad, as well as a movie, a radio play, and a sensational dance song. And Gaga’s art absolutely needs to be part of the mainstream to make any sense. It’s no accident that her first two albums are called The Fame and The Fame Monster.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that this heady combination of surrealism and accessibility hasn’t been seen in this country for more than twenty years—since June 10, 1991, to be exact, when Twin Peaks went off the air. Both Lady Gaga and David Lynch used their nimbleness, intelligence, and talent to introduce an unprecedented level of strangeness to a mass audience. Both ended up on the cover of Time. Both were clearly just good kids at heart. And both emerged during recessionary, politically divided, and culturally conservative periods that nonetheless managed to produce at least one exemplar of the outré, as if all the culture’s unresolved weirdness were being channeled into a single icon. Lynch, of course, has retreated in recent years, and where Gaga goes from here is anyone’s guess: I have no doubt she’ll continue to produce interesting music, but it’s hard to imagine her thriving anywhere but in the spotlight. But at the moment, she threatens to make the rest of us seem obsolete.

Last week, I had dinner with a college friend I hadn’t seen in years, who is thinking about giving up a PhD in psychology to write for television in Los Angeles. We spent a long time commiserating about the challenges of the medium, at least from a writer’s point of view, hitting many of the points that I’ve discussed here before. With the prospects of a fledgling television show so uncertain, I said, especially when the show might be canceled after four episodes, or fourteen, or forty, it’s all but impossible for the creator to tell effective stories over time. Running a television show is one of the hardest jobs in the world, with countless obstacles along the way, even for critical darlings. Knowing all this, I asked my friend, why did he want to do this in the first place?

My friend’s response was an enlightening one. The trouble with writing novels or short stories, he said, is the fact that the author is expected to spend a great deal of time on description, style, and other tedious elements that a television writer can cheerfully ignore. Teleplays, like feature scripts, are nothing but structure and dialogue (or maybe just structure, as William Goldman says), and there’s something liberating in how they strip storytelling down to its core. The writer takes care of the bones of the narrative, which is where his primary interest presumably lies, then outsources the work of casting, staging, and art direction to qualified professionals who are happy to do the work. And while I didn’t agree with everything my friend said, I could certainly see his point.

Yet that’s only half of the story. It’s true that a screenwriter gets to outsource much of the conventional apparatus of fiction to other departments, but only at the price of creative control. You may have an idea about how a character should look, or what kind of home he should have, or how a moment of dialogue, a scene, or an overall story should unfold, but as a writer, you don’t have much control over the matter. Scripts are easier to write than novels for a reason: they’re only one piece of a larger enterprise, which is reflected in the writer’s relative powerlessness. The closest equivalent to a novelist in television isn’t the writer, but the executive producer. Gene Roddenberry, in The Making of Star Trek, neatly sums up the similarity between the two roles:

Producing in television is like storytelling. The choice of the actor, picking the right costumes, getting the right flavor, the right pace—these are as much a part of storytelling as writing out that same description of a character in a novel.

And the crucial point about producing a television series, like directing a feature film, is that it’s insanely hard. As Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant point out in their surprisingly useful Writing Movies for Fun and Profit, as far as directing is concerned, “If you’re doing it right, it’s not that fun.” As a feature director or television producer, you’re responsible for a thousand small but critical decisions that need to be made very quickly, and while you’re working on the story, you’re also casting parts, scouting for locations, dealing with the studio and the heads of various departments, and surviving on only a few hours of sleep a night, for a year or more of your life. In short, the amount of effort required to keep control of the project is greater, not less, than what is required to write a novel—except with more money on the line, in public, and with greater risk that control will eventually be taken away from you.

So it easier to write for television? Yes, if that’s all you want to do. But if you want control of your work, if you want your stories to be experienced in a form close to what you originally envisioned, it isn’t easier. It’s much harder. Which is why, to my mind, John Irving still puts it best: “When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.”

One of the most frustrating and challenging moments in any writer’s life is when you know where you are and where you want to be going, but have no idea how to get there. In fact, there are times when I feel like one of the gnomes in the celebrated episode of South Park from which the above image is taken. You’re writing a story, and you have some good ideas for the beginning and the end, but the part in the middle is a mystery. This unknown element can be as small as the distance between two minor plot points or as large as the entire second act, but in all cases, the essential problem is the same. All you need is something to get from point A to point C, and, ideally, it should be brilliant.

This situation is a familiar one for writers of mystery and suspense fiction. A good mystery novel should come off as a perfect puzzle, in which every element was carefully premeditated and laid in beforehand, but in practice, large gaps are often left by the author to be filled in later. In Writing the Novel, Lawrence Block relates that while writing the first installment in his popular series of Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries, he got within two or three chapters of the ending before finally figuring out who the villain was, thanks to a chance remark by a friend. “I had to do some rewriting to tie off all the loose ends,” Block notes, “but the book worked out fine.” I have a feeling that most mystery novelists could tell similar stories. And as long as the result looks preordained, it’s perfectly okay.

I’ve encountered similar issues all the time in my own writing, even though I outline like crazy. With The Icon Thief, I knew from early on in the process where the story would end: in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with my main character standing before the closed door leading into Étant Donnés. How to get her there, however, remained a problem for a long time, and it wasn’t until I had written more than a third of the novel that I managed to come up with a solution. Similarly, in House of Passages, there’s a moment when I knew that a character had to make a series of brilliant deductions to advance to the next stage of the plot. But what? I could see the blank space where they would go, but not the deductions themselves, and like Block, I ended up going back and laying in most of my clues after the fact.

And yet this is one of the great pleasures of writing. I’ve previously quoted Walter Murch on the fact that you don’t want to answer all of the questions posed by a work of art at its earliest stages. In fact, you should hope that serious questions remain unanswered until the very end. In any artistic pursuit, once you’ve reached a certain level of competence, there’s always the risk that you’ll become bored or complacent. The best way to avoid this is by deliberately leaving problems for yourself to solve, trusting that luck, intuition and skill will carry you through. Almost invariably, they do—or at least well enough so that, with the proper adjustments, nobody will ever notice the seams. In the process, you’ll grow as a writer. And maybe, in the end, you’ll even profit.

All I ask is one thing, and I’m asking this particularly of young people that watch: Please do not be cynical. I hate cynicism, for the record it’s my least favorite quality. It doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.

—Conan O’Brien, on January 22, 2010

While I still haven’t gotten around to tackling the definitive appreciation of The Simpsons that I’ll inevitably need to write one day, in the meantime, I thought I’d highlight an underappreciated element of that show’s legacy: its DVD commentary tracks. Over the past decade or so, even as I’ve stopped watching the show itself, its commentary tracks—featuring Matt Groening, the showrunners for each season, and an assortment of writers, directors, and producers—have become an inseparable part of my life. Since I already know most of the episodes by heart, I’ll often play an audio commentary in the background while I’m exercising or doing chores around the house, to the point where I’ve probably listened to some of these tracks twenty times or more. And every other year or so, I’ll systematically work through the entire series, as I’m doing now, going backward from season thirteen all the way to the premiere.

It’s hard to explain why, but these commentaries have become weirdly important to me, sometimes even exceeding the importance of the episodes themselves—especially at this point in the series, when the underlying material tends to be mediocre or worse. Even for middling episodes, though, the commentaries are still compelling: two of my favorites are for “The Principal and the Pauper” and “Bart to the Future,” episodes that probably rank near the bottom of the pack. A Simpsons commentary track is simply the best radio show in the world, with a roomful of smart, nerdy guys talking with great enthusiasm about a subject of intense interest to them, and to me. In the process, I’ve enjoyed getting to know people like writers David Mirkin, Matt Selman, and Ron Hauge, and directors Mark Kirkland, Susie Dietter, and Jim Reardon, who otherwise would just be names on a screen. And I’ve painlessly absorbed a lot of valuable information about storytelling—such as the observation, by Josh Weinstein, I think, that five minutes of sentiment is too much, but fifteen seconds is just right.

At this point, though, after twenty listens or more, I’ve begun to suck most of the pulp out of these commentaries, so I’ve been casting about for alternatives. Futurama, not surprisingly, has commentaries that are equally engaging, and it’s always fun to listen to David X. Cohen and Ken Keeler, among others, unpack the show’s many references. (Futurama remains the only series that ever inspired me to look up the Wikipedia article on P versus NP.) And I’ve spoken before about how much I love audio commentaries by Francis Ford Coppola: his voice is warm, grandfatherly, almost conspiratorial, drawing you into a frank discussion of his triumphs and disappointments, generous with both his philosophy of life and the technical side of filmmaking. It’s as close as most of us will ever get to hanging out with Coppola himself, and a reminder that the best commentary tracks are a reflection of the artist’s personality.

What else? My single favorite commentary for a movie is probably Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie’s track for The Usual Suspects, where they cheerfully point out plot holes and continuity errors while imparting, almost incidentally, a lot of irreverent observations on the creative process. A close second is Nicholas Meyer’s commentary for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which provides a great deal of candid insight into one of my favorite movies, as well as the art of storytelling itself. (“Storyteller,” Meyer tells us, is what he always puts down when asked for his profession on customs forms.) David Mamet is usually captivating, even when he’s being glib or cagey; I recently put on his commentary track for House of Games, featuring Ricky Jay, while preparing my tax returns, which made the process a lot more bearable. And I’m always looking for others. If you’re a commentary track addict like me, and if you have any special favorites, I’d love to hear about them.

Today on the A.V. Club, an article by critic Noel Murray has inspired a nice little discussion on the problem of spoilers, an issue on which I have some mixed feelings. On the one hand, I’ve been spoiled before. I had the death of a major character on The Wire spoiled for me by a clue in the New York Sun crossword puzzle, of all things. (Why, Peter Gordon, why?) And it always stings. On the other hand, I also believe that avoiding spoilers entirely can make it hard to read any kind of serious criticism. In some cases, a detailed plot summary can make it easier to get through a challenging work of art, whether it’s Game of Thrones or Andrei Rublev. And a good work of art is, or should be, more than the isolated details of its plot. It’s impossible to spoil a movie’s visual aspects, its director’s style, or the details of a great performance—although it’s certainly possible, alas, to spoil a joke.

In fact, you could make the argument that a defining factor of great art is its immunity to spoilers. And the opposite also holds: once a bad work of art has been spoiled for you, there’s rarely any reason to seek it out. Like a lot of people, I enjoy reading detailed plot summaries of horror movies that I never intend to see, to the point where I could probably give you a pretty good description, sight unseen, of the plot of Saw II. And I don’t think I’ve missed much—which is not the case for The Descent, for instance, not to mention The Shining. The same is true, unfortunately, of many works of mystery and science fiction. All too often, such stories are little more than delivery systems for a twist or an interesting idea, which could be conveyed as effectively in a paragraph as in an entire novel. (That’s why I like Borges, who pretends that the novel he wants to write already exists, and gives us the essential points by writing a review of it.)

A really good novel or movie, by contrast, has qualities that can’t be expressed in summary form. And it’s still possible to enjoy such works of art while knowing how they conclude, if the artist’s craft is strong enough to return you, at least temporarily, to a state of narrative innocence. One of the most striking examples is The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Everybody “knows” what happens in that story, so it’s startling to read it again, as I did a few weeks ago, and remember that the original novel, unlike its many adaptations, is structured as a straight mystery. Stevenson saves the revelation of Hyde’s true identity for the end of the ninth chapter, and the effect, if you can put yourself in the position of a reader experiencing it for the first time, is stunning—the only detective story, as others have pointed out, where the solution is more horrible than the crime.

The same is true of many classic movies. I’ve lost track of how often I’ve watched Psycho—I’ve seen it on the big screen three times, twice in the past two years alone—and yet the structure of that movie is so strong, with its brilliant opening mislead, that the first appearance of the Bates Motel, through its dark curtain of rain, hasn’t lost any of its original power. (Seeing it with an audience also helps, especially when it comes to that wonderful second murder, which has rarely, if ever, been spoiled.) The same is true, to a lesser extent, of the end of Citizen Kane: I’ll never be able to experience it the way it was intended, but by the time that moment comes, I can glimpse at least a shadow of what it might have been. Is it good enough? Yes. But I’d still give anything to experience it, just once, the way it was meant to be seen.

As long as we’re on the subject of ensembles, I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the best ensemble sitcom of the decade, and arguably the best television show of any kind: Arrested Development. Like most people, I caught up with this series long after it had been canceled, and for a while, I was reluctant to try it, mostly because it was clear to me that this was a writer’s show, with elaborate plots and storylines, which are usually deadly to comedy. I couldn’t have been more wrong, of course: once I finally gave it a chance, thanks to its availability on Hulu, I discovered that this is the rare series that successfully blends comedy, farce, and surrealism into a flawless whole. And while Arrested Development remains so singular a series that it turned out to be difficult—even for its creator, Mitch Hurwitz—to apply its lessons elsewhere, it’s still tempting to ask how the show does what it does.

Granted, nothing ruins a joke like explaining it, and Arrested Development can hardly be reduced to a set of rules. Still, it’s possible to gently examine the roots of the show’s appeal. First off, it has a strong cast playing extraordinary characters, all of whom compete fiercely and successfully for the viewer’s attention. It’s worth emphasizing how unusual this is: in most ensemble shows, not every character is equally compelling, but in Arrested Development, everyone in the primary cast is ridiculously watchable, and even among the scores of recurring characters, there’s barely a dud (except perhaps Martin Short’s painfully unfunny Uncle Jack). And as the AV Club’s Steve Heisler recently pointed out, the enormous cast works, from a dramatic perspective, because each character has a clearly defined selfish agenda. (I once used The Godfather as an illustration of how large casts need to be defined by their objectives, but Arrested Development may be an even better example.)

Second, this is an incredibly organized show. One reason that Arrested Development struggled to find an audience is that it makes the viewer work, or at least pay attention, in a way that other sitcoms don’t. As David Mamet likes to point out, you can tune into a show like Friends halfway through and know, within seconds, what the story is. Arrested Development is the exception: it asks us to keep track of a huge cast, an intricate ongoing plot, and throwaway gags that often don’t become clear until after multiple viewings of an entire season. This isn’t entirely unprecedented: The Simpsons did it for many years. But it took The Simpsons at least three seasons to ramp up to its peak velocity, while Arrested Development hit the ground running. And, as in most great shows, form is inseparable from content: it was the first sitcom to use the now-popular documentary format, but so far, it’s the only one to use that form (with cutaway shots, archive footage, and above all Ron Howard’s terrific narration) to increase the density of information that the viewer can process.

Third, and perhaps most crucially, the show used its exceptional cast and innovative narrative techniques to tell strong, emotionally grounded stories. True, the emotion usually only crept in at the last minute of each episode, but as writers on The Simpsons like to point out, fifteen seconds of sentiment is often all you need, while two minutes is probably too much. Arrested Development‘s greatest achievement lies in making you care, weirdly, about the characters: Will Arnett’s work as Gob stands as a master class in turning a gloriously unsympathetic character into someone easy to love. The result was a show that, for all its frenetic pacing, was also willing to take its time when it counted—for instance, in the slow burn of Charlize Theron’s arc as Rita, Michael’s mysterious girlfriend, which took five episodes to build to an unforgettable conclusion. And for all its imitators, it stands alone. There may or may not be a movie; Mitch Hurwitz may never have a chance to make a show this good again. But he did it once. And that’s enough to ensure his immortality.

In the meantime, though, here’s some Tobias:

On Friday, my wife and I finally caught Bridesmaids, which is a classic example of energy and a star-making performance (by the sensational Kristen Wiig) bringing out the best in a formulaic, if nimble, script. It also benefits, like most films from the Judd Apatow factory, from a remarkably deep bench of supporting actors, including Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, Ellie Kemper, Jill Clayburgh, and Jon Hamm. The ensemble is so good, in fact, and has the potential to pair off its actors in so many surprising ways, that it’s something of a disappointment when the movie starts to focus exclusively on Wiig. We’re given a couple of scenes with the bridal party as a whole, but they all occur in the movie’s first half, and we’re never given the sort of inspired, inexorable comic set piece that the chemistry of the cast might have led us to expect. (Perhaps that will have to wait for the inevitable sequel.)

The movie’s decision to shy away from its supporting cast—the characters played by Ellie Kemper and Wendi McLendon-Covey, in particular, all but disappear in the third act—is a puzzling one, both because of the thrust of the marketing and because ensembles, especially in comedy, can result in unforgettable moments. Many of the recent films in the Apatow universe have revolved around putting a bunch of funny actors onscreen, rolling a lot of film, and hoping that something great happens. And occasionally it does. This is especially true of in television: even a mediocre episode of The Office, for instance, is usually worth watching for the sake of the cast, which retains a lot of viewer goodwill and still yields unexpected combinations. And as I’ve said before, it was Mad Men that opened my eyes to the potential of large casts of characters and the possibilities they provide.

Ensembles are particularly useful in television, where the various arrangements of characters can supply material, hopefully, for years of stories. To put it in the nerdiest terms possible, it’s an instance of Metcalfe’s Law, which states that the value of a social network is proportional to the square of connected users (n², or, more precisely, n(n − 1)/2).  A cast of characters is a peculiar kind of social network: it’s assembled by a producer, set into motion by the actors and writing staff, and its value lies in its connections, as various characters collide in interesting ways. The number of dramatically useful interactions also tends to increase over time, which is why the second and third seasons of a good television show are often the most interesting, once actors have had a chance to discover their most fruitful combinations. (Which is also why it’s sad that so many promising shows never get the chance to find this rhythm.)

Of course, there are limitations to such a model. Too many characters, and the show may never get the chance to adequately establish its supporting cast, so the pairings seem forced or arbitrary. (See: Glee.) But if exercised judiciously, it’s a useful tool for all kinds of narrative fiction, including the novel—and particularly for writers who otherwise tend to overlook such possibilities. As I’ve mentioned in previous postings, my first novel was a fairly focused story, with a limited number of important characters, largely because the plot itself was already so complicated. The sequel has a much larger cast, partly because I wanted to put some of Mad Men‘s lessons to use, and because I hoped that an expansive supporting cast would take me to interesting places. And I’m not the only writer to recognize this. In one of the notebooks he kept while writing Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann writes:

Nothing yet has been done about staffing the book with meaningful subsidiary figures. In The Magic Mountain these were provided by the personnel of the sanatorium, in Joseph by the Bible; there it was a question of realizing the potentialities of the Biblical figures…The characters will have to be supplied out of the past, out of memory, pictures, intuition. But the entourage must first be invented and fixed…

More than almost anything else, a rich entourage of characters, if it arises naturally from the plot and setting, can take the story in unexpected directions. A large cast isn’t always a good thing. But if you’re looking to expand the world you’ve created, there’s no better way than to select two characters at random, put them in a room, and see what they have to say.